About Betsie

Introduction

If you've ever used a screen reader, you'll know exactly what I mean when I say that the web isn't always all it's cracked up to be. Some sites work when you have the computer reading out loud exactly what's on the screen, from left to right, and top to bottom, but not all of them. Not even many of them. Most sites come out like gibberish, all disjointed, with half a line here, half a line there like some kind of random beat poetry, which isn't always what you want. The funny thing is that the sites that do this include some of the biggest and most popular places on the whole Web.

Until Betsie, even the BBC site didn't work properly for blind users, which is why, in June 1998, a group of people from the RNIB met with a group of people from BBC Online, to explain in detail exactly what the problems were. There were two results of that meeting. One was that a lot of us on the BBC side came away from the meeting knowing a lot more about the idea of accessible HTML than we did before. Another was what ended up becoming the Betsie project.

If you're not blind, you may never have heard of a screen reader. Screen readers are bits of software that blind people use instead of a monitor to get their computers to talk to them. Before Betsie, users of screen readers visiting the BBC site had to struggle with whatever sense their software could make of the columns that almost each and every page on the whole site had been divided up into. Which wasn't much.

Now you can just ask Betsie for the page you want, any page at all in the BBC Online site, and she will give it to you in a form that your machine will be able to make sense of, leaving you to do the important stuff, like enjoy the site, find out when the radio program you want is on, or do a search on.. whatever it is you want to search the BBC website for.

How Betsie Works

The way that Betsie works is as follows. Normally, when you want to look at a web page, you tell your browser what page you want to look at, and your browser goes and gets that page from the right machine on the Internet. When you want to look at a web page with Betsie, you tell your browser to ask Betsie for the right page. Betsie then gets the page, but before sending it on to you, Betsie makes various changes in the HTML code of the page - removing all the images and the unnecessary formatting, so that what you get sent is the text content of the page, unmolested and at the top, with all the links on the BBC Navigation Bar moved to the bottom, so they aren't the first thing you have to deal with every time.

Every link on the Betsie version of a page is to the Betsie version of that page, so once you start looking at the BBC site with Betsie, you can just keep going. To start using Betsie straight away, just go to the Betsie home page and follow any of the links there to the Betsie-enhanced versions of the main BBC sites.

Limitations of Betsie

There are two ways in which Betsie is limited. For various technical reasons it has not been possible for the BBC to offer a full text-only version of the entire Internet at this time, so Betsie will only work with BBC sites. Links to sites outside of BBC Online will be marked with the word 'external', so that you know the page you get after such a link might not be accessible.

The other limitation is that Betsie doesn't always work with absolutely everything - yet. There is a rogue 5% of pages that still have access problems, and while we are now doing our best to make sure that as many of our sites as possible are accessible to everyone, Betsie is only part of a larger programme to ensure this. It is therefore possible that there are still a few sites in BBC Online which do not meet the high standards of accessibility for all which the Betsie project is intended to achieve.

We apologise for this - we are currently working to eliminate all such pages - and we would be very grateful if you could write in and point out anything on the BBC site that you feel could be improved in terms of accessibility. Almost every page on BBC Online has a link to a feedback form on it, or alternatively you can use the one on this site. Your help and feedback is an invaluable part of the process of improving our sites as much as possible - we thank you in advance for your help and are looking forward to hearing from you.

Betsie Site Contents

This page was last updated on 13th December, 1999.

Don't like this colour scheme? Try green on black.